I was asked what resources I’d point new designers to so they could improve their craft

They should study the history of their craft. Design is so rich and deeply bound with our cultures across millenium. Current fashions are a fleeting moment. If you want to find your way through the confusion and excitment of now understanding all the lessons learned by the people who got us here is invaluable.

For instance – if you want to understand typography better start with how type evolved. Serif letters evolved in stone Roman carving, probably as a stylisation of ways to neaten the end of the carved line. Roman inscriptions in stone where often commands from tyrannical demi-god psychopaths with the power of life and painful death over any readers. The ultimate authority. 2500 or so years later if you want our type to feel authorative we use serif typefaces.

It’s wild and extraordinary. It gives me butterflies just thinking about the deep of meaning embedded in everything we take for granted. This is our material as designers, we need to love it and study it. It’s culture.

And for UX: Know that understanding users didn’t start with a couple of blocks coining ‘UX’. Go back a hundred years and look at the pioneering work of Lillian Gilbreth using time and motion studies to understand how people actually used kitchens. The design of your kitchen is influenced by her work.

Planning user journeys? Marcia Bates and Berrypicking 1989

Pushing the limits of interaction across different devices? You need to study everything that came out of Xerox PARC

Etc. etc. There’s so much, go deep.

I think I was expected to point to newsletters, to tiktoks, a useful prompt, not turn around and pull a month’s worth of reading about type from my shelves

But design is too exciting and too deep to just look at the now